I live in Berlin, which is not particularly pleasant when you cannot escape it, the buildings like knees pressing into my back, the cars rolling high walls of exhaust around me. I thought I’d want to spend this month escaping to the countryside in fiction if I couldn’t manage it real life, but instead I ended up in villages, thinking about distrust, strangers. A village is an appealing thing to be part of and a worrying thing to visit. Here’s some worth spending your time on.
Imagine Daisy Jones & The Six is a Gothic British horror story and you’ve got Elizabeth Hand’s WYLDING HALL, seething with wrens and folk terror. It’s an oral history about an acid-folk band from London who spend a summer in the 70s in Hampshire recording their second—and final—album. There’s the usual enjoyable inter-band dynamics, the tension of sexual politics and a sweet nod to generational grumpiness, but mostly this novel is just the kind of creeping horror that feels almost delicious, like shoving sour candy in your mouth until it’s stinging. Bird beaks show up underfoot, along with neolithic tombs, burial goods, too many teeth, old folk songs better left unsung, and a very creepy village pub. A short, horrible and extremely entertaining ride.
(buy directly from PS Publishing)Hammered by grief, the unnamed narrator of Esther Kinsky’s GROVE moves to Olevano, a small village outside Rome, where she walks between the town and its mountainous surroundings, travels to cities, tracks the sleepy cats and dogs of the village along with the birdlife—sparrow hawks, young herons sitting on the power lines, flamingos radiating nerves—and, almost obsessively, lingers in graveyards, beside any tomb she can find. The landscape swerves up around you in Caroline Schmidt’s lucid translation, in all its ugly seasonal turns and rushing moments of power, light and water. I think this is a book best read in tiny installments, a chapter at a time like a sombre treat so you can absorb it with the proper attention to detail, but I read it obsessively in two sittings, in a week of bad news, plugging myself into Grove’s lush hostility and sinking out of sight.
(buy directly from Fitzcarraldo Editions)Xiaowei Wang’s BLOCKCHAIN CHICKEN FARM got me with its excellent name and front cover, but its interior is more impressive: in the introduction Wang cracks their knuckles and unfolds a clear and powerful vision that dismantle the binaries with which we write about technology: city/country, human/AI, natural/artificial, individuals/communities. An interconnected series of essays about the impact of tech in rural China, Blockchain Chicken Farm is both an illuminating source of fascinating reporting—the eponymous essay is a great example, but I also loved Wang’s writing on surveillance technology in urban villages and the in-depth, sprawling look at Taobao Villages—and a new take on tech writing that includes speculative elements like recipes for food from the moon and a guide to feeding AI. Wang explains concepts like blockchain with effortless clarity so that even a dummy like me can get it, then opens the door to the future. This collection was an eye-opening and shyly optimistic thrill.
(buy @ bookshop)I am going to have to ask you to trust me more than you ever have before, and recommend a Jane Austen sequel. I know! I know! But in a secondhand bookshop recently I stumbled across MANSFIELD REVISITED, a sequel to Mansfield Park only written by Joan Bloody Aiken (of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase fame) and had a very fun time with it. Mansfield Revisited picks up several years after the events of Mansfield Park to tell the story of Susan Price, Fanny Price’s little sister who comes to join the Bertrams at the end of the novel. Old favourites return, while Aiken also adds her own gently charming new characters to the canon. Mansfield Revisited is not a particularly good sequel to Mansfield Park — it defangs the glimmering menace that I love so much in Austen’s original, and, unable to hold that wavering balance as steadily and aptly as Austen does, resolves most of its characters into Always Good or Always Bad, to the utmost detriment of the Crawfords in particular. But it’s wonderful for watching a beloved author engage with her own beloved author, like a one-sided conversation searching, begging for answers, and it has a very sweet love story. If you didn’t like Mansfield Park but like most of Austen, you will like this novel; if you loved Mansfield Park, you will enjoy picking your fights with Aiken’s interpretation, as well as her undeniably on point Lady Bertram.
(buy @ betterworldbooks)ALSO CONSIDER: A poem just a little late for Halloween; Kemi Fatoba’s brilliant article in Die Zeit, Stadt, Land, Angst; Tamora Pierce’s Daine rolling her way through Tortall countryside, befriending wolves; the funniest bits of Cold Comfort Farm (aka most of it), keeping an eye out for its imagery and “the frosted roofs of Howling, crisp and purple as broccoli leaves… like beasts about to spring”; all the Georgian and Victorian villages, excuse me, we dine with four-and-twenty families; Ray Bradbury’s extraterrestrial squabbles; James Baldwin’s unforgettable “Stranger In The Village”.